so
varied in their combinations that no distinct traits would be carried
over from one generation to another. As a matter of experience all these
three processes take place and are recorded in families of distinct
quality, good, bad and indifferent. If the character-potential is
predetermined, then manifestly education and environment can play only
the subordinate part of fostering its development or retarding it.

In the same way the character and career of the various races of men are
determined by the potential inherent in the individuals and families
that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long
periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of
distinction. There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay,
the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and
Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as
recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There
are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton,
East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in
Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the
cultural and character-creating influences of education and
environment--beyond a certain definite point--than are the amphibians of
Africa or the rampant weeds of my garden.

This is a hard saying and a provocative. The entire course of democratic
theory, of humanitarian thought and of the popular type of scientific
speculation stands against it, and the Christian religion as well,
unless the statement itself is guarded by exact definitions. If the
contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing
that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the
result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery
would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable
process. Since, however, this assumption of materialism is untenable,
and since all men are possessed of immortal souls between which is no
distinction in the sight of God, the situation, regrettable if you like,
is one which at the same time calls for the exercise of a higher
humanitarianism than that so popular during the last generation, and as
well for a very drastic revision of contemporary political and social
and educational methods.

The soul of the man is the localization of divinity; in a sense each man
is a manifestation of the